The European Union’s top tech regulator has called for international rules on artificial intelligence, warning that the technology’s growing capabilities bring serious cyber and biological risks.
Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen made the remarks after AI company Anthropic said it had disrupted attempts to use its models in the development of biological weapons.
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Anthropic also reported that it had shut down several state-sponsored surveillance operations using its technology in China, Iran and west Africa.
Speaking to reporters in Dublin, Ms Virkkunen pointed to the EU’s AI Act as an example of regional regulation.
But she acknowledged that comparable rules do not exist worldwide.
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“It’s very important that we continue international co-operation because I see that global rules are really needed here.
“With AI there is, of course, huge potential and so many positive things, but there is also risk, and we have to be aware of that, cyber risks and bio risks, we are aware that these are very serious topics ” she added.
Anthropic outlined five case studies involving possible biological misuse of its systems in a report titled ‘Detecting and countering misuse of AI’. The San Francisco-based company described such activity as “one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models”.
The research described in the cases covered the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus, a “highly-pathogenic” bird flu strain, a family of viruses that includes smallpox and mpox, as well as venoms and other toxins.
According to Anthropic, the people involved bypassed restrictions intended to stop users in unsupported regions from accessing its models. The actors also “engaged in other efforts to obfuscate the purpose of their research to evade our safeguards”.
“When we detected and investigated these cases, we banned the users’ accounts and incorporated our investigative findings into our frontier model safeguards, enforcement, and threat intelligence processes to better prevent, detect, and disrupt these activities in the future,” the report said.
Anthropic said it could not determine the actors’ intentions with certainty and did not identify them.
Anthropic also accused Chinese companies of ‘distilling’ Claude data to improve their own models
“The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm,” the report said.
Anthropic said it published the examples to “spark conversation within the AI industry, and with governments, about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them”.
Anthropic says China, Iran used its AI to aid spying
Anthropic’s report also described several state-backed surveillance operations that it said had been halted after using its AI models. The company warned that governments and state-aligned groups are increasingly turning to AI to monitor ethnic minorities and political dissidents.
The incidents were detected and disrupted between January and July, and originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said.
The surveillance efforts “targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted”.
“These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad,” the report said.
In one incident, Iranian actors created a system to identify individuals through their social media accounts. In another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude “to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering”.
In July, Claude CEO Dario Amodei called on the US government to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced AI
“AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce,” the report said.
Anthropic said it had also intervened in attempts to design weapons and run dating scams.
The AI company further accused Chinese developers of using Claude deceptively to generate answers for their own users while “distilling” the information to improve competing models.
In the AI industry, distilling describes the use of one model to train another.
Chinese developers have previously been accused of using the method without authorisation, effectively drawing on resources from US-based companies including Anthropic and OpenAI.
Anthropic now alleges that China’s Moonshot and Deepseek secretly used Claude to produce responses for their customers.
“In one instance, over a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic” through a “network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan,” the report said.
Some of the requests included sensitive personal information and may have breached privacy agreements.
“We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party,” the report said.
Anthropic said Deepseek had used comparable methods.
Earlier this week, an artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic announced plans to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to build AI models capable of self-improvement.
Additional reporting AFP
